Direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels give brands more control over their online presence and offer more opportunities for sales growth. Setting expectations from the start helps brands navigate this labor-intensive process, ensuring teams are positioned for optimal success.
There are many factors to consider when launching a new channel, but there are three primary questions that will help your brand find success.
Question 1: How Will You Optimize Your Go-To-Market Process?
Outside of the content for your D2C channel, improving operational efficiency is vital for overall success. One of the common problems brands face when expanding to online sales channels is scattered content and disconnected teams.
Centralizing your product information can unite sales and marketing, allowing them to easily access and manage up-to-date content within a central source of truth. Using spreadsheets, emails, and hard drives to organize content slows teams down and leads to work overload. The Salsify product information management (PIM) solution can help your brand navigate this process.
Commerce-driven workflows help speed up the time-to-market process, which helps improve sales. Simplification of these processes will also help boost your team’s confidence and give them back time to focus on bigger-picture projects and details they might otherwise overlook.
Question 2: How Will You Mitigate Channel Conflict?
Your brand has likely experienced some channel conflict if its ever used D2C marketing. Opening up a D2C line can sometimes make retailers, wholesalers, dealers — and even your own sales representatives — unhappy.
Consider looking at this challenge from a different perspective: If you allow these groups to handle all of your distribution, your brand could suffer in the process. Solutions like Salsify’s product experience management (PXM) platform can help brands find options to manage channel conflict.
Your brand’s ultimate goal is to make its customers happy, which helps push them to become loyal customers. This can be accomplished by opening up new opportunities like creating exclusive products, product bundles, or product giveaways. Offering indirect discounts also helps your brand avoid pricing wars.
Question 3: How Will You Gather Buyer Insights?
What do your customers love about your products — and what do they loathe? Simple insights like these are enormously valuable for brands, as data feeds the innovation process. Without a pipeline to this information, brands are simply guessing about what’s resonating with customers.
It’s possible to gain insights about shopper behavior, and then turn these insights into action. Salsify offers brands digital shelf analytics, including reports on share of search, product page performance, and search engine optimization (SEO) to help you learn what you can do to optimize your products on the digital shelf.
There are also insights for brand compliance, minimum advertised price (MAP) violations, and competitive price intelligence. These insights empower you to change what isn’t working, which helps strengthen the impact of your D2C channel.
Salsify Empowers D2C Brands
Does your brand have the ability to centralize and manage product content from a central source of truth — across your entire organization? Can your brand activate this content across any channel quickly and easily? Is your brand engaging shoppers with compelling product experiences? Is your team continuously optimizing to stay ahead of the competition and expand opportunities for discovery?
The Salsify product experience management (PXM) platform empowers brands to answer yes to all of these questions, allowing them to continuously drive performance on the digital shelf. Click below to listen to our on-demand webinar on how to become a consumer-obsessed organization. 
